Wilde West (8 page)

“T
HE REAL POWER TO
create,” Oscar pronounced, “lies with the artisans, the people that work for you and make things for you. The great trouble in America is that you give your work over to mere machines. Until you change this you will find little true art.”

How many times had he delivered this lecture? Fifteen, twenty?

However many it had been, he had never delivered it before with such elan, such effortless consummate skill.

Earlier today, the matinee had gone badly. After his morning with Elizabeth McCourt Doe, his knees had been weak, his delivery weaker. The thin crowd had been restive, distracted, and he had plodded through the English Renaissance like a mule through a bog, thinking only of its end.

(Afterward, a sour and suspicious Vail had asked him how the breakfast had gone. “Dreadful,” Oscar had told him. “The local minister was present, and also three ladies from the Women's Temperance Society. My eyes glazed over so badly that for several moments I thought I had gone blind.”)

But Oscar had napped before supper, a light, restful sleep threaded with vivid visions of his morning, and now he felt expansive, weightless and airy, and yet somehow more charged with himself, with his own unique potency, than he had ever been in his life.

This was something more than mere self-confidence. It was a feeling almost blasphemous, something akin to what a god might feel when, out of ennui perhaps, he visited the shrine where he was worshiped.

And, strangely, it enabled him to see the text of his lecture with new eyes. He detected in the sentences and paragraphs subtleties of thought, felicities of expression, which for some reason had escaped his attention till now.

And it enabled him, as he delivered the lecture, to play with the thing. He paused now, and he emphasized, where before no emphasis or pause had existed. He teased out the length of vowels, clipped the consonants, rolled the words up from his diaphragm to his throat and then down along his tongue. Tonight the words were notes of music; tonight he was the instrument and the musician who played them.

The nap had helped him, certainly. But more important,
she
was here tonight.

“The basis of our work in England is that we have brought together the handicraftsman and the artist. Think not that these can be isolated. They must work together. The School of Sculpture in Athens and the School of Painting in Venice kept the work of these countries at the head of the world.”

She sat, she and Tabor, in the box seats at stage right. Behind them in the box were a few other Denver luminaries, four men looking as stiff in starched collars and black ties as Indian maharajahs. Perhaps they were bankers, or perhaps they were dead.

Tabor was not grinning tonight. He sat in his red plush chair with the epic seriousness of a monumental bronze, his lower lip protuding thoughtfully below the stuffed sparrow of a mustache, his balding, egg-shaped head nodding from time to time in ponderous approval.

Tonight she wore a flounced dress of gray satin, a broad bonnet of matching silk, a stole of elegant ermine, white as a snowbank below the Titian fall of her hair. She sat demurely, her hands clasped together on her lap, and no one who observed her now could possibly imagine that only this morning those hands had been stroking and kneading his trembling flesh and groping between his legs. Oscar could scarcely imagine it himself.

But on her red lips played that small, knowing, Gioconda smile.

“All the arts are fine arts. There is no art that is not open to the honor of decoration and the rules of beauty.”

Her white breasts are perfectly rounded at the bottom, and they slope down along their upper surface in a graceful arc to broad, pale pink, puckered aureoles and stiff fragrant nipples the thickness of fingertips; and, kneeling upright and naked on the huge four-poster bed, her long body at once lean and voluptuous, she offers them to him cupped in slender hands as he buries his head between them and inhales the impossible dizzying scent. Moans like small trapped animals move in his throat. Neither of them has said a word since her “Afterward” and his “Ah.”

“Think of those things which inspired the artist of the Gothic school of Pisa. The artist saw brilliantly lighted palaces, arches and pillars of marble and porphyry. He saw noble knights with glorious mantles flowing over their mail as they rode along in the sunlight.”

He lifted the glass from the lectern, raised it to his mouth. As he sipped—the water was cold and tasted faintly but not unpleasantly of sulfur—he glanced around the dim opera house.

The room was full tonight, row after row of silent disembodied heads and shoulders rising in tiers to the shadows at the far wall; more people, these equipped with arms and legs, crowded the aisles.

And they were enrapt, all of them, gazing up at him as though mesmerized.

And it was not the message (despite its patent brilliance and profundity) that so bedazzled them; it was the messenger. He could have—had he chosen to—declaimed a string of nonsense syllables. For some of them, doubtless, he was doing so now.

There was this to be said about an audience: it reflected back to the speaker his own excellence, his own power. Like a mirror. Like a lover.

For the first time, Oscar understood the terrible addictive intoxication of the actor, the priest, the demagogue.

“He saw, too, groves of oranges and pomegranates, and through these groves he saw the most beautiful women that the world has ever known.”

Astride him, the slick strong walls of her sex gripping at his stiffness, her red hair draped in curtains along his face, she turns her head slightly to the right and sucks in through pursed lips and clenched teeth a long shivering sibilant breath. He lifts his own head from the satin pillow and locates her wide wet mouth, her adroit slippery tongue. His hands, amazed at their good fortune, stagger across the opulence of pliant, and compliant, flesh. He can feel his spine becoming molten as, too soon, too soon, unstoppable, his climax builds.

“One of the most absurd things I ever saw was young ladies painting moonrises on a bureau and sunsets on a dinner plate. Some consideration of the use to which the article is to be put should enter into the mind of the artist. It is well enough to have moonrises and sunsets, but we are not particularly pleased to dine on them.”

Appreciative laughter rippled through the audience—followed, as often happened on the tour, by the isolated lunatic chortle of some buffoon who had finally seen the point, or finally seen that he was supposed to. (Perhaps, lecture after lecture, dogging him from city to city, it had been all along this same buffoon.)

He glanced at her theater box, casually, not lingering on any of the faces, even hers; the lecturer calmly surveying his audience.

Her smile had widened now.

He felt a tremor of pride and triumph. And felt also, under his knee britches, behind the providential shelter of the lectern, a stiffening in his crotch. He took another sip of water.

Pity he couldn't dip behind the curtain and douse poor Freddy.

“These things, and many others, are what your schools of art should teach your young people.”

Afterward, his mind is fragmented. An inchoate surge of feelings—none of them attached to any rational thought—lashes around the rubble like waves around splintered rocks. Gratitude and awe seem to be the major streams, but there is also disbelief and guilt and even a small measure of unease.

She lies beside him curled in a comma, head on his shoulder, leg across his stomach.

“I am,” he says, “astonished.” His voice is not yet his own.

Along the skin of his upper arm, he feels her lips move in a smile. Then she turns her head and her small pointed teeth bite lightly into his flesh. “It was Fate,” she says.

He smiles; he shares the sentiment, of course. “But which, exactly, was fated? My astonishment? Or this?” He waves a hand to indicate their bodies, the bed, this particular moment into which the storm of previous moments has swept them, driftwood, jetsam.

“Both,” she says. “All of it. Everything.”

“I know that this is absurd,” he begins. “We met only yesterday. But I really must tell you—”

The tip of her finger lands softly atop his mouth, closing it.

“Don't,” she says. “I know already. Don't say it. If you put it into words, it will start to die.”